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Shotgun! Sunny Side for iOS shows passengers which side of the car to sit on to avoid the sun

It’s maybe not top of your list of problems, but when traveling distances by car, bus or train, it can be a little bit irksome when you find yourself sitting with the sun in your eyes for large chunks of the journey.

With that in mind, a quirky new iOS app called Sunny Side wants to help you know in advance which sides of the vehicle will be more susceptible to golden rays of sun.

How it works

Sunny Side calculates the trajectory of the sun from point A to point B, based on your times and places of departure and arrival. According to this calculation it will show you where the sun will be shining during your journey.

Obviously the position of the sun will change throughout the trip, as will the road you travel on, so this app will give you a percentage to help you optimize your seating arrangements – the sun will be on the left 94% of the time? Great, sit on the right.

There was an inherent problem with the app, however, in that it didn’t always detect phony place names – I entered some random letters, and it didn’t seem to mind:

So, rather than throwing up an error message each time, it seems to take a best-guess on where you meant, though it doesn’t tell you where it thinks that is. For that reason, it’s best to ensure you always spell your places correctly.

That said, sometimes it does seem to know when you’ve entered something incorrectly.

This is a fundamental problem with the app, and doesn’t fill me with confidence, but it seems that limited resources and/or know-how are partly to blame here.

“The app doesn’t have auto-correct for place names, because I’d need my own database of places among other things,” says developer 33-year-old Miland Miliša, a graduate teacher Living in Zagreb, Croatia. “For me as startup app developer, it is too big a chunk of cake to chew.”

There must surely be plenty of place databases available for free that would easily fix this issue, and it would certainly make a big difference to the quality of the app.

So, how did Sunny Side come about, exactly?

“My frequent travel between Zagreb and Split caused considerable anxiety always about the same things,” says Miland. “Bus seats ware always on the sunny side and in my five-hour trip I could not get rid of the sun.”

Not a game-changer by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s always interesting to see new app ideas such as this come to fruition, even though it still needs a bit of work.

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